Short story: Preferences started disappearing as I was using my MBP, but no data was lost. What caused this?
Today, I was doing some browsing in Safari while I waited for a file to upload to Dropbox. At some point, I noticed that all of my calendars in iCal had disappeared, and while I was investigating that, I discovered that my Address Book contacts were gone as well. Every app I tried opening would act as if I had never used it before, although when they did finish opening completely, all my user data was still there. So for instance, iPhoto would ask me if I wanted it to automatically open when I connected a camera (which I had previously configured), but my photos would be there when it did open. Skype, Adium, Safari, and anything else I tried would be the same. No username, passwords, or bookmarks saved. If I closed a program that was acting normally and tried re-opening, then all the settings would be gone when it restarted. Other user accounts seemed to be unaffected.
Eventually, I tried rebooting the system, but when I came back in, the desktop image was back to the default and all mouse corner settings were gone.
As far as I could tell, only the preferences folder in my user directory was affected, although I think there may have been some damage in the application support folder as well. I've restored things from a backup, but I can't tell whether I can trust this computer anymore.
Anybody experienced anything like this? I can't find anything on the net talking about a problem like this, although there were reports of something similar happening after using the guest account on earlier versions of Snow Leopard. Any guess as to whether it's software or hardware?
Today, I was doing some browsing in Safari while I waited for a file to upload to Dropbox. At some point, I noticed that all of my calendars in iCal had disappeared, and while I was investigating that, I discovered that my Address Book contacts were gone as well. Every app I tried opening would act as if I had never used it before, although when they did finish opening completely, all my user data was still there. So for instance, iPhoto would ask me if I wanted it to automatically open when I connected a camera (which I had previously configured), but my photos would be there when it did open. Skype, Adium, Safari, and anything else I tried would be the same. No username, passwords, or bookmarks saved. If I closed a program that was acting normally and tried re-opening, then all the settings would be gone when it restarted. Other user accounts seemed to be unaffected.
Eventually, I tried rebooting the system, but when I came back in, the desktop image was back to the default and all mouse corner settings were gone.
As far as I could tell, only the preferences folder in my user directory was affected, although I think there may have been some damage in the application support folder as well. I've restored things from a backup, but I can't tell whether I can trust this computer anymore.
Anybody experienced anything like this? I can't find anything on the net talking about a problem like this, although there were reports of something similar happening after using the guest account on earlier versions of Snow Leopard. Any guess as to whether it's software or hardware?